Ontra is the leader in AI-powered solutions for the private markets. Its AI automates critical private market workflows across the fund lifecycle, enabling firms to accelerate contracts, streamline compliance, and automate entity management. To reinforce its dominant leadership position in the space, Ontra is investing heavily in AI, building purpose-built solutions powered by both commercial LLMs and proprietary models. At the core of this effort is a commitment to protect customer data while ensuring the scalability and velocity of AI development.
Tonic Textual has become a foundational part of this strategy by helping Ontra to consistently de-identify and synthesize both structured and unstructured data for safe, scalable AI innovation.
The challenge: Consistent ground truth at scale
For Ontra’s AI Foundations team, led by Yuxiang Liu, Senior Manager of Machine Learning, success is measured in modeling velocity and system scalability. A major bottleneck, however, was the generation of ground truth datasets, which are the accurately labeled, real-world reference data used to test and evaluate AI/ML services. Without sufficient ground truth, even the most advanced models risk underperforming, slowing down both experimentation and deployment.
Before Tonic.ai, Ontra would anonymize documents using another product, but then faced the costly and time-consuming task of re-processing anonymized documents to create alignment between structured and unstructured datasets for evaluation. This slowed development cycles, increased costs, and constrained the pace of AI innovation.
The solution: Unified de-identification across all data types
Ontra adopted Tonic Structural in 2023 for anonymizing structured data, and in 2025 expanded into Tonic Textual to tackle the unique challenges of unstructured legal documents.
With Tonic.ai, Ontra can now redact and synthesize the unstructured data within legal documents while ensuring consistent anonymization across corresponding structured datasets. This capability allows the team to accelerate ground truth generation, enabling more evaluations within the same amount of time. At the same time, Tonic.ai reduces both cost and complexity by eliminating duplicate data processing efforts, streamlining Ontra’s workflows and maximizing efficiency.
According to Liu, Tonic Textual’s performance with entity detection, which is measured through precision and recall, was on par or better than other vendors up for consideration; but Textual’s ability to maintain consistency across structured and unstructured data is a clear differentiator.
The impact: Faster AI development at a lower cost
With Tonic Textual in place, Ontra’s AI Foundations team can now produce higher-quality anonymized datasets more quickly and at a lower cost. The platform enables the team to boost modeling velocity by generating more ground truth within the same timeframe, ensuring their engineers can evaluate and deploy models at greater speed.
At the same time, Tonic Textual maintains high recall rates that reliably protect sensitive information while also reducing redundant processing of anonymized documents. These efficiencies translate directly into lower costs and simplified workflows.
For Ontra, the impact is tangible: greater scalability, faster model development, and the ability to expand its suite of AI-powered solutions without ever compromising customer trust.
Why Tonic.ai?
When evaluating de-identification vendors, Ontra prioritized entity detection accuracy as the key metric. Tonic Textual met this benchmark, but its differentiator was the ability to consistently anonymize both structured and unstructured data in tandem – an essential requirement for AI evaluation workflows.
Just as important, Liu emphasized Tonic.ai’s customer service, “Tonic has great customer service that truly listens to its customers.” This combination of technical precision and attentive partnership made Tonic Textual the clear choice to enable Ontra’s AI initiatives.
Looking ahead
As Ontra continues to scale its AI initiatives in private markets, Tonic Textual provides the foundation for secure, compliant, and efficient innovation. By eliminating bottlenecks in data preparation, Ontra is better positioned to deliver the next generation of AI-powered solutions for the private markets—faster, and with greater confidence in the protection of customer data.
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